One year on with Calla body cameras at Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

One year on with Calla body cameras at Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

17/08/2018

Berrywood Hospital is a purpose-built facility that helps individuals re-build their lives in a safe and caring environment. The hospital provides state-of-the-art facilities for inpatient mental health services for adults and older people, and recently won the 2018 HSJ Patient Safety Award for Best Product/Innovation for Patient Safety with their Calla body cameras.

Last year they published a paper that outlined the feasibility of using body worn cameras in an inpatient mental health setting, which included positive staff and service user feedback from using body cameras. The paper recorded:

Just over a third of patients thought staff would behave more professionally, two fifths thought that patients may be less likely to be aggressive.

Patients described the benefits as being: safety for everyone, respect for staff, better treatment for patients, accurate recording and clarifying situations in possible unjust accusations.

Compared to the same period the previous year the need for emergency restraints (where there was a high or immediate risk of harm) went down from 41 incidents to 18.

Now the team at Berrywood have rolled out Calla body cameras to an entire ward to see the difference every nurse wearing a camera makes.

Andres Patino, head of mental health services, said this was to test the impact of the technology even further. “The original pilot that we did was to give one member of staff on each ward a camera and we wanted to test whether the use of body worn cameras reduced violence and aggression in the hospital overall." Patino began.

“When it came to phase two what we wanted to do was to test that even further so that every member of staff on one ward wore the camera at all times, compared to those areas where only one person was wearing it.”

Seth Brul is the Ward Matron for Marina ward, wihere every nurse is now wearing a Calla camera. He saw first hand the difference having multilple cameras made to the patients and staff. Brul said “Now that we have the full 12 cameras we always have camera footage available if an incident was to occur.”

“One camera won’t capture the whole incident" explained Ward Matron Wayne Lawrence "so it is really useful to have more than one camera”